P Kharel

Shed the façade, and the game’s up. Increasingly serving as the first plank of defence — and offence — the news gathering profession risks being low on credibility but high on boastful claim. This means a big trouble ahead for both serious minded professionals and institutions committed to the integrity of journalism practice in general.

The length news folks go to secure scoops can be a rigorous pursuit not many undertake. Case studies are revealing. The cut-throat competition for transmitting a story first before other competitors do is a race against time involves exacting energy, drive, ingenuity and quick thinking. Immediately after the Kennedy assassination in 1963, a reporter sharing a limousine with a rival counterpart threw the phone away to disable the latter from contacting his news desk. The reporter thus deprived of alerting his editors confessed that he would have done the same if faced with such situation.
Unlike proven news scoops, it is not rare for dubious information getting disseminated by the media with large audiences. In the global context, if the Watergate exposure was a series of mindboggling exposures, the 1991 unplugged incubator babies’ tale in Kuwait was an extreme lie lapped up by the big and the mighty.

Kuwaitgate
American senators, human rights organisations, Amnesty International and a range of others took the fake story dished out by large international news outlets. Since news agencies, too, fell for it, ignoring the basic professional rule to verify and cross-verify information without letup, the consequent influence infected a staggering number of other organisations across the world.

The rule book is to probe deeply for accuracy, especially on stories with potentially wide ramifications. But the major international news agencies, which had subscribers on all continents, ignored the basics of journalism because they conveniently wanted to believe it. They turned their ear to the skies and not the ground, and were willing/unwitting conveyor belts in the flow of the black propaganda — a phrase the American intelligence agency CIA coined for its staff members in the 1960s.

A group of 17 “eminent writers”, in March, advised all concerned to tell truth of the war in Ukraine and employ “all possible means of communication” to directly contact and address Russian citizens. Their exhortation was directed at Russians, as if the stories that originated in the West were Bible truth. It is here that Kuwaitgate, the propaganda coup of the post-World War II decades of the 20th century, needs to be narrated in its treachery.

On October 10, 1990, Nayirah, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, gave a false testimony, later retracted, before the US Congressional Human Rights caucus. She said: “While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor.”

Lies were peddled as facts in a glorified Goebbels style. The news media of the American make and others, fed by AP, AFP and Reuters, fuelled the lie as an absolute truth narrated by the teenager who, not long after, was identified as the daughter of Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. When the lie was exposed two years later, the world came to realise how deep the conspiracy had been. It was all the work of an American public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton, which coached the Citizens for a Free Kuwait, ostensibly an NGO.

The Reuters news agency reported that Iraqi “troops took premature babies out of incubators” in Kuwaiti hospitals and took away the equipment. The Los Angeles Times wrote: “Refugees reported that incubators for premature babies were confiscated by Iraqi troops and the babies inside were piled on the floor and left to die.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Washington Post and the U.S. News & World Report carried similar reports, detailing the “shocking” acts of “brutality” at Kuwaiti hospitals. All major American TV networks echoed likewise. While President George W. Bush mentioned the tale a dozen times or so, several senators based on the lie their argument against Iraqi forces’ extent of brutality.

‘All’s fair in war’
H&W had conducted a $1 million study to determine the best way to win support for its sponsors, after which it came upon with the idea of premature babies in incubators. The Kuwaitis paid the public relations campaign a service charge of $12 million. The news media willingly fell for the fancy tales baked with political ingredients by chefs wearing blinkers. Governments pretended to believe the convenient tale that they knew was the work and imagination of a paid propagandist agency.

In the US, the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, a non-governmental organisation headed by two members of the House of Representative — one each from the Democratic Party and the Republican Party — joined the bandwagon in condemning the attacks on babies in hospitals. No one seemed to have noticed that the Foundation’s office was located at H & K’s Washington headquarters at a suspiciously low rental rate.

Less than two years later, Americans found how they had been taken for a rude ride, when the truth inevitably came out. The level and intensity of public trust in the US media suffered consequences: a steady decline in the public trust of news outlets.

According to a recent survey, only about 50 per cent of Americans regard some of the leading news outlets as credible in 2021. At the same time, 66 per cent of Democrats and 36 per cent of Republicans viewed the ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal as “somewhat credible”. If that is the level of public trust in the leading media, the conditions of the rest can be imagined.

Some term Kuwaitgate an atrocity propaganda, which was nothing less than an out and out black propaganda perpetrated without qualms on an unsuspecting world. Borrowing a lesson from that incident, people should take the ongoing tirades exchanged since the past several weeks between the US-led allies and Russian and its supporters only with a fistful of salt, if not largely ignored as probable propaganda.

If the Watergate wire-tapping political scandal in the 1970s led to American President Richard Nixon’s resignation, the Kuwaitgate turned out to be an extremity propaganda that ruthlessly resorted to emotional blackmail of not just Americans but the larger world. And there has been no proper apology from the perpetrators, their inspirers and financiers, and the publicity community of any grain or grey.
A propaganda is a propaganda by any name, whatever its source and place of origin.

(Professor Kharel specialises in political communication.)